The Moral Efficacy of Aesthetic Experience: Figures of Meaning in the Moral Field

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of "figuration". The term "figuration" intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed as meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant's moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely analogical relations between beauty and morality. However, it is also possible to see how certain aspects of Kant's aesthetic theory execute wider, and potentially more important, functions for his practical philosophy, such as providing meaningful orientation for the ascetic moral attitude of his duty-ethics. In this respect, certain figures of Kant's aesthetic theory may well be viewed as complementing the dependence in his moral philosophy, in the important sections on moral pedagogy and methodology, on appeals to heroic models and stories as ways of shaping and inculcating the moral disposition. This paper considers these aspects of interaction between Kant's aesthetic and moral philosophies as both (1) a problem for the consistency of his philosophy given his avowed exclusion of aesthetic and religious elements of meaning in his duty-ethics; and (2) as a case study for the new, schematic analysis of "moral figuration" outlined in the paper.     

Aesthetic Negativity and Aisthetic Traits

Abstract

This article concerns the notion of aesthetic negativity, and related ideas regarding the autonomy of art. After giving some initial definitions and a brief historical sketch of these concepts, we will examine the definition proposed by arguably the greatest thinker of aesthetic negativity, Theodor Adorno, and its recent semiotic reconstruction in the work of Christoph Menke. This reconstruction configures aesthetic negativity and autonomy jointly as the capacity of artworks, and the experiences that they occasion; to processurally negate “automatic” modes of understanding. This account is then critiqued, and contrasted with views on aesthetic experience that stress its nonconceptual and asemiotic aspects, and the close affinity of this modality of experience with perceptual presence and affective intensity, with a clear reference to the phenomenological tradition. Some recent ideas about how semiotic and phenomenological theories regarding art can interact are then cited, and an undertheorized aspect of their connection introduced, which is the main original import of the article. This connection, which is furnished by the concept of aisthetic trait, is derived from psychoanalytic metapsychology, and is an example of how the meaning and presence effects of art can act not just in a competing synchronic fashion, but can morph into each other over time. A trait is a signifier-like perceptual remnant of a prior subjective experience of high intensity that provides a kind of ratification of the experience that endures within the life history of an individual. This is then shown to have relevance to the previous topics of aesthetic negativity and autonomy in terms of the way that the trait mechanism may bring to light important diachronic aspects of aesthetic experience that are currently absent in other accounts in the literature.     

Diving into the Wreck: Aesthetic Spectatorship at the Fin-de-siècle

Abstract

The popularity of films like Titanic betokens a massive shift in the nature of aesthetic spectatorship in our time. The contemplative, distanced viewer who is able to judge from afar the spectacle before him or her, has been replaced by a more proximate, involved "kinaesthetic" subject whose body is stimulated as much as his or her eye. This is evident not only in mass culture with amusement thrill rides and the return of what has been called the "cinema of attractions"; this new spectator can also be discerned in avant-garde culture, as shown by the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists which caused such a stir in London and New York. This spectator is especially attracted to simulacral scenes of destruction and catastrophe, in which he or she is virtually immersed. If aesthetic judgement is to be a model for its political counterpart, as has been argued by theorists like Lyotard and Arendt, it cannot do so on the basis of this aesthetics of violent immersion.     

Back to Mangu Zambiri: Art,Politics and Identity in Northern Sudan

This paper is an attempt in cultural criticism from a certain aesthetic standpoint to investigate how the arts can give insight into the identity problem of Northern Sudanese. Given the archaeological and historical refutation of migration theory and the consolidation of the notion of the ethnic continuity of the central riverain inhabitants (the Ja'liyyin) as Nubians, the paper disputes the other characterization of them as a "culturally" Arabized Sudanese. To prove this, the long neglected aesthetic dimension as an essential component of culture is underlined. Challenging certain Arabocentric musical and literary discourses, the "Sudanese" nature of some aspects of Northern music and poetry is stressed. The concept "Sudanization" is adopted to define a historically ongoing key process which manifests itself in the arts. Also the term "specification" is used to describe alternative political and aesthetic discourses to define Sudanese identity such as the discourse of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and other forces.     

The Writing Lesson: Imaginary Inscriptions in Cultural Encounters

Abstract

This article takes a moment of intercultural exchange, first reported as "The Writing Lesson" by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and later explored by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, as the occasion for further reflection on the role played by the aesthetic in what it terms intercultural transference. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies or patterns of being and relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects and their recipients. It emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, and to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Intercultural transference provides a framework to read "The Writing Lesson" differently and suggests a theoretical model able to account for the complex performances of intercultural transference that enter any exchange or translation between cultures.     

Section 8: The time for fundamental program change?

Abstract

We argue that Section 8 low‐income rental assistance—now called the Housing Choice Voucher Program—needs to be restructured and integrated with the other elements of the federal safety net for low‐income households. Since the program was introduced in 1974, the quality of the nation's housing stock has continued to improve, to the point that only a very small percentage of it is severely inadequate. Yet low‐income households continue to face problems such as affordability, neighborhood decline, limited access to economic opportunity, and involuntary mobility.

While the Section 8 program has partially addressed some of these problems, it has a number of shortcomings, primarily the fact that it does not materially improve housing conditions for most recipients. Instead, it is little more than a poorly disguised income supplement. Housing vouchers should be directly integrated into the federal safety net as an entitlement to households that qualify for assistance.     

Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Reflections on the 2015 York University Strike through a Marcusean Lens

Abstract

In this article, we see the month-long graduate student and contract faculty strike at York University (Toronto, 2015) through a lens informed by Herbert Marcuse’s thought. In the context of widespread student protests across North America against neoliberal austerity, we draw on our picket line experiences to argue that Marcuse’s work provides insights into how students and faculty can engage in critical praxis within the neoliberal university. We argue that CUPE 3903, the union of TAs and contract faculty at York, is a kind of counter-institution that Marcuse argued was necessary for liberation. Marcuse strategically urged students to take advantage of gaps or cracks in a disintegrating system. Our analysis revolves around the complex experience of the graduate student picket lines – a “gap” – as a site of rupture for the liberation of aesthetic experience, “organized spontaneity,” open, democratic organization, as well as conflict.     

The Blues Voice of Houston Baker,Jr. as Political Theory: An(Other) American Paradigm?

The work of Houston Baker, Jr. in Afro-American literary studies is almost unparalleled. Baker argues that in America there is a distinctive American cultural language, a vernacular, only black Americans share in by virtue of their race. This distinctive language is the result, he argues, of their condition with regard to the larger American culture and society. Baker claims that because of the "special circumstances" (chattel slavery and continued racism) that black Americans found and continue to find themselves in they have had to devise social, cultural, and political strategies that were significantly different from the dominant "white" culture. Thus, Baker argues, special analytic "tools" are necessary for grasping the ultimate messages contained in the cultural (political) works of Afro-American writers and thinkers. It is my argument that Baker is engaging in an explicitly political project. My intention in what follows is to "decode" Baker's work, to ferret out the assumptions and political theory behind his attempt at transfiguration of American cultural discourse. It is my contention, finally, that his method is unlikely to secure what is in its broadest form a very worthwhile political project.     

Expressing the Ineffable: Toward a Poetics of Mystical Writing

This article attempts to formulate a paradigm for textual features that are embodied in mystical writing. By using T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as an example, this paper demonstrates that five distinctive textual strategies are operative in mystical writing: (1) negation as a heuristic means of spiritual ascent; (2) parallelism and paradox: an iconic correlation; (3) the matrix of a journey; (4) the generic sentence as a highlighted voice; and (5) metaphor of depersonalization. It will be argued that the five textual strategies contribute to forming a poetics of mystical writing. The argument also exemplifies an alternative to the religio-philosophical and traditional literary interpretations of Four Quartets : this poetic work embodies a condensed, crystallized poetics of mystical writing.     

Innovation and the cost of mortgage credit: A historical perspective

Abstract

Since the inception of U.S. institutional mortgage lending in the 1830s there have been major changes in mortgage instruments, the delivery system, and funding sources. Some of these changes qualify as innovations that have lowered the cost of credit and increased its availability. This article divides the history of U.S. mortgage finance into three periods and identifies the source and type of major innovations.

The “Origins” period, from 1831 to 1931, included the development of many mortgage lending institutions and instruments. The second era, “A Wonderful Life,” featured a government‐supported special circuit that dominated mortgage finance from 1932 to 1981 and witnessed development of mortgage‐backed securities. The current era, “A Brave New World,” features a new system of credit delivery dominated by specialized institutions and technology. In it, application of automated underwriting and artificial intelligence may have far‐reaching effects on the market and the accessibility of low‐income households to mortgage credit.     

The Classical Trinity and Kant's Aesthetic Formalism

Abstract

I identify two mutually exclusive notions of formalism in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: a thin concept of aesthetic formalism and a thick concept of aesthetic formalism. Arguably there is textual support for both concepts in Kant's third critique. I offer interpretations of three key elements in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement which support a thick formalism. The three key elements are: Harmony of the Faculties, Aesthetic Ideas and Sensus Communis. I interpret these concepts in relation to the conditions for theoretical Reason, the conditions for moral motivation and the conditions for intersubjectivity, respectively. I conclude that there is no support for a thin concept of aesthetic formalism when the key elements of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement are understood in the context of his broader critical aims.     

Modernity Gone Awry: Lefort on Totalitarian and Democratic Self-representation

Abstract

This essay starts by reviewing Claude Lefort's writings on totalitarianism, a theme that runs like a red thread through his oeuvre and plays a key role in the different stages of his intellectual development. The analysis of the USSR is a central interest of Lefort and his colleagues at Socialisme ou Barbarie (and inspires them to adopt an explicitly "political" approach against the "economism" of their fellow Marxists); the problem of totalitarianism features prominently in Lefort's theory of democracy and human rights (where it functions as the "flipside" of democracy); and the theme holds Lefort's attention well after the events of 1989. The emphasis of this essay, however, is not on the chronology of Lefort's trajectory, but on the methodological role of totalitarianism in his theoretical framework. Lefort's account of totalitarianism serves him as a tool to dissect the symbolic fabric of modern society. In Arendt's view, totalitarian rule reveals something of the essence of modernity, as a movement towards ever increasing technical mastery. For Lefort, by contrast, totalitarian tendencies arise as an attempt to close off the experience of indeterminacy that has been opened up by political modernity. He shows that the totalitarian "imaginary" (which he dissects in psychoanalytic terms) presupposes yet deliberately inverts the very ideas that sparked the democratic revolution and that are central to the self-representation of democratic societies. In consequence, democracy is continuously at risk of degenerating into totalitarianism. Importantly, the totalitarian threat, which Lefort believes to be the main threat to modern society, only becomes visible by adopting a specifically "political" perspective. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we continue to under stand and to interpret our society in "political" terms, that is, in reference to the symbolic constellation of collective power.     

Philosophy and the History of Art

Abstract

Schelling’s philosophy of art between 1801 and 1807 can be defined as metaphysics of art. The object of that metaphysics is to deploy the absolute as the being of art and of the arts. Schelling has been criticized on the basis that this metaphysics of art represses the infinite diversity of existing works of art, while overlooking concrete aesthetic experience. Based on Schelling’s definition of the “philosophical construction” of art as an inseparably speculative and historical construction, the aim of this paper is to challenge such assertions. It will show that “historical construction” has to be understood in a twofold manner: first, as a transcendental history of the absolute’s artistic individuation and second, as a cultural history of both the ancient and modern worlds of art. Working within this twofold setting the paper argues that Schelling’s systematic approach, while exhibiting a unifying force, still remains open to the otherness of the real.     

Deleuze and literature: Metaphor and indirect discourse

This paper deals primarily with Deleuze's work on literature? but also looks briefly at related ideas in the books on cinema. Deleuze has often concentrated on what he calls ‘American‘ literature, particularly in Critique and clinlque. The first part of the paper seeks to outline some of the main elements of this particular literary field for Deleuze. The paper then goes on to show how the general rejection of metaphor that informs Deleuze's work on literature can be more precisely defined as a theory of free indirect discourse. The concept of free indirect discourse is? as Frangois Zourabichvili has shown, at the heart of Deleuze's work? aesthetic or otherwise. For example, the idea of the percept functions as an aesthetic application of free indirect discourse, and Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 suggest that this form of enunciation represents a new aesthetic cogito to which cinema is ideally suited.     

Interpretation after Kant

Abstract

After tracing the rise in interest in the phenomenon of interpretation to events in the early post-Kantian period, I argue that this development is highly relevant to understanding contemporary philosophy's methodological status and its relation to fields such as science and literature. I argue that much of recent philosophy is best understood in terms of an "interpretive turn" that has now provided philosophy with a modest but valuable and distinctive role. I illustrate the procedure of philosophy in this key by critically appropriating ideas about interpretation advanced by Harold Bloom and Richard Rorty, and by using hints about the role of history that arise from discussions of Kant's notion of genius.     

The Death Penalty and the Peculiarity of American Political Institutions

This article examines distinctive American political institutions that contribute to explaining the continued use of the death penalty. In the light of wide popular support for capital punishment, strong political leadership is considered to be a principal channel for the abolition of capital punishment. The dilemma of the US death penalty, however, lies in populist features of political structures that greatly limit the political leverage and possibilities available to leaders. The institutional arrangements in the United States allow public support for the death penalty to influence political decision making more directly than it can in the European counterpart. A strong receptiveness of US political leaders to the public also implies that once public opinion changes, political leaders are likely to respond to the public’s new attitude. Unlike most countries, which abolished the death penalty through political initiatives that were counter-majoritarian, the United States may abolish it only after a change in public opinion.

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Pragmatism and Radical Democracy

Abstract

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning.     

If low‐income blacks are given a chance to live in white neighborhoods,will they stay? Examining mobility patterns in a quasi‐experimental program with administrative data

Abstract

After describing the distinctive features of various policy models of residential mobility, we examine the long‐term outcomes of the Gautreaux program. Administrative records provide baseline characteristics for all participants, and we located recent addresses for over 99 percent of a random sample of 1,506 participants an average of 14 years after original placement.

Although 84 percent of the families made subsequent moves, the racial composition of the current address is strongly related to program placement, even among movers, and after family attributes and premove neighborhood characteristics are controlled. Combined with our prior findings, these results suggest that residential mobility has an enduring, long‐term impact on the residential locations of these families. Contrary to models that assume that families’ enduring preferences will quickly erase these moves, these results suggest the need for further research to consider whether mobility alters preferences or structural barriers.     

Applying Functional Grammar: A Discourse Analysis of Sexually Explicit Stories Written in Adult Magazines

A number of studies have addressed the relationship between sexual orientation and its effect on erotic discourse. Taken together, these studies provide limited evidence that heterosexuals in general may talk less explicitly and less candidly about sexual matters. Adopting the tools of Halliday's functional grammar, I undertake a discourse analysis to compare and contrast two erotic stories published in mainstream sexually explicit adult magazines. These two texts include depictions of: (1) cross-sex sexual activities written for heterosexual men; and (2) male same-sex sexual activities written for gay men. I analyze the mechanisms employed by the narrators for the purposes of thematic development, the representation of the processes, participants and circumstances, and the establishment of interpersonal relationships between the stories' narrators and the readers. I provide evidence that the narrators exploit parallel linguistic devices. I argue that this is not surprising given that the texts' purposes are similar: to provide erotic pleasure to those readers who choose to read them. The linguistic means of deriving erotic pleasure is thus not so much argued to be a function of sexual orientation, but rather personal sexual preferences that vary from individual to individual within the heterosexual and gay male communities.     

Justice as a claim to (social) property

Abstract

Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. This paper provides an appraisal of Kohn’s recovery of solidarism, taking as its main theme the relation between property and social justice. The paper first offers a typology of four theories of justice (right- and left-libertarianism, luck and relational egalitarianism) and discusses the relation of each of these to the concept of property. Then it argues that solidarism is akin to left-libertarianism in the way it formulates justice as a claim to social property. Finally, it argues that solidarists cannot escape grounding their theory in a non-property based fundamental principle, which makes the theory much less distinctive from egalitarian theories of justice than may appear at first sight.